Financial Chronicle: Executive Vice Chairman of Cognizant India Says Technology is a CEO-Level Agenda Today

“Cognizant expects to post yet another year of industry-leading revenue growth. We remain confident in the overall demand environment and in our revenue guidance of at least $10.3 billion, which translates to growth of at least 16.5 per cent for the year,” says R. Chandrasekaran. “At the end of the first quarter, we have also increased our non-GAAP EPS outlook for the full year 2014. Our solid first quarter performance reflects the strength of our portfolio across industries, services and geographies.” Excerpts from the interview:

“We saw solid growth across financial services, manufacturing and retail, communications, hi-tech and media/entertainment. Among geographies, Europe overall grew 9.6 per cent sequentially and 35 per cent year-on-year. The UK saw a strong 12.8 per cent sequential growth and 28.2 per cent growth Y-o-Y, hitting $1 billion mark for the first time. In Q1, we observed certain clients optimizing their “run better” spend to further invest in their “run different” initiatives, including spending on social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) and digital capabilities.

During the quarter, we also accelerated our recruitment with 7,200 net hires —the strongest hiring in the past two-and-a-half years.

We had a solid start to 2014. This is reflected in Cognizant reaffirming revenue growth guidance for calendar 2014. We are optimistic because the fundamentals of our business remain strong. An increasing number of CEOs around the world are asking questions about how new technologies can be leveraged to build competitive advantage. Technology clearly is a CEO-level agenda today.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-decade shift in the technology landscape driven by social, mobile, analytics, cloud (SMAC) and other digital technologies. SMAC technologies are redefining industries and their prevalence is throwing up vast amounts of rich data around people, devices and organizations. At Cognizant, we call this digital information the Code Halo. Extracting information from Code Halos and using that for driving strategy and new business models have become the basis for competitive advantage in many industries. We’ve recently published detailed findings from our research and client engagements on Code Halos and this has served as an additional catalyst for our digital business offerings.”

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